I was so excited reading this title, thinking Netflix for gaming had finally come. But it seems that is still a far off dream

Also, no Xbox backwards compatability streaming? I'm starting to think that Sony's Genkai purchase may greatly outshine Microsoft, which will be sad considering the sheer amount of cloud experience MS brings to the table.

I'm usually optimistic about new services that try to expand the reach of gaming or media, I even like the Ouya, but I just don't see where this fits in.

Unless they allow streaming of games purchased from other services this is dead on arrival. You want me to pay you full price to download a game, and then $15 a month to stream that to another device. Oh, and that monthy subscription fee to the MMO? Yikes.

People who've streamed games before, how's the performance? Obviously things like sports games and fighting games is pretty much not playable, but I would imagine it would work well with things like Civ or Sim City right?

People who've streamed games before, how's the performance? Obviously things like sports games and fighting games is pretty much not playable, but I would imagine it would work well with things like Civ or Sim City right?

OnLive has a free trial you can check out. Your description pretty much sums it up. I played Civ5 on it for a while, and the speed of their computer was definitely faster, it cut down the AI's turn move time by like 50%. I also tried out Just Cause 2, it was pretty close to playable and could be a replacement if I had no other devices to play it on. Competitive fps, fighting games, etc are definitely not playable though.

I'm usually optimistic about new services that try to expand the reach of gaming or media, I even like the Ouya, but I just don't see where this fits in.

Unless they allow streaming of games purchased from other services this is dead on arrival. You want me to pay you full price to download a game, and then $15 a month to stream that to another device. Oh, and that monthy subscription fee to the MMO? Yikes.

From the story: "Supported games can be purchased directly from OnLive or through digital distribution services like Steam"

People who've streamed games before, how's the performance? Obviously things like sports games and fighting games is pretty much not playable, but I would imagine it would work well with things like Civ or Sim City right?

I had no trouble playing first person shooters using OnLive back when I used the service. In fact, I discovered the original Borderlands using the service.

What I liked most about it was the ability to try the actual game for 30 minutes instead of trying a demo level. Eventually I dropped it since I wasn't playing often enough to justify the subscription.

I was on Comcast in Chicago. Being close to one of their server farms may have made the difference for me. I also never tried any PvP, which may be a worse experience.

Single player shooters worked (and looked) as well on the service as on my local 4 year old PC at the time.

I remember playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent during a trial moment of OnLive. It was very easily playable, and I didn't really notice any glaring quality issues, although it was comparable to console-style 720p.I'd imagine some types of games, like a Quake-style twitch-shooter, or fighting games, would have trouble with timing. That's sadly a large variety of games, but there may still be a sizable niche for services like this if they can be lenient enough with ownership. I imagine exploration games like Batman: Arkham Wordspam could still be perfect for it.

ALSO: One thing I loved was having a public Twitch-style interface where you can start watching someone else playing a game. It can often give you a more honest impression of a game than its various CGI trailers, though many people prefer finding a Let's Play-er.

People who've streamed games before, how's the performance? Obviously things like sports games and fighting games is pretty much not playable, but I would imagine it would work well with things like Civ or Sim City right?

I played a few games (NBA, MLB, Deus Ex, I forget the others), each one was hit or miss. Sometimes they were great, other times the graphics suffered, other times they were jittery and laggy. It was a bit disappointing, but I still love the idea and if they made improvements would be willing to try it again.

I'm usually optimistic about new services that try to expand the reach of gaming or media, I even like the Ouya, but I just don't see where this fits in.

Unless they allow streaming of games purchased from other services this is dead on arrival. You want me to pay you full price to download a game, and then $15 a month to stream that to another device. Oh, and that monthy subscription fee to the MMO? Yikes.

From the story: "Supported games can be purchased directly from OnLive or through digital distribution services like Steam"

Gah! I think that's the first time I've commited a RTFA offense. I wonder how they verify a legit install/purchase in that case. Do they not only have to support the game, but the store/service you bought it from? Anyway, it will be interesting to see where this goes -- they better hope it takes Steam a loooong time to allow more than just local network streaming.

Since I heard about these guys a few years ago, I thought they needed to partner with Good Old Games and host their catalog. All of the sudden you have an appealing catalog of games and being able to play classics without the goofy emulation and system incompatibility hurdles would be a boon. The bandwidth and lag issues would not be a problem with games like Ultima 7 or Icewind Dale.

Since I heard about these guys a few years ago, I thought they needed to partner with Good Old Games and host their catalog. All of the sudden you have an appealing catalog of games and being able to play classics without the goofy emulation and system incompatibility hurdles would be a boon. The bandwidth and lag issues would not be a problem with games like Ultima 7 or Icewind Dale.

Except most GOG games aren't exactly taxing, even for old hardware with integrated graphics. I believe there's even DOSbox for Android.

Personally, I thought their best bet was to partner with a major cable company. It seems like being able to subscribe to games along with cable TV and have those games hosted and streamed via one's local cable company would actually be a value added service.

I own a MacBook laptop with an integrated graphic chipset, and I was able to play Borderland and Batman Arkham Asylum on it using Onlive some months ago.

The only downside was that compression artifacts were sometimes visible, but otherwise the experience was very smooth and I really had the feeling to be playing games locally on my computer. No lag at all for me.

Oddly some old games like Stalker were unplayable due to those compression artifacts, while some others like Saint Row 3 very not affected at all. I wonder if their latest improvements to the service have fixed that.

So the new selling point is they want me to pay $15 a month to play games I already own.I don't get it...

It seems like all of the cloud/streaming stuff these days is just a way to get you to pay a recurring monthly fee, potentially forever. Even Sony and Microsoft are heavy into the monthly fees (PS+, etc) this generation.

At what point do you look at your $100+ monthly bill for all these services and determine that you would have been better off just buying a few more AAA games?

Hell for $15 a month you could get a whole bunch of Humble Bundle games, or a few from GoG.

(Or like 1 SNES game on the Virtual Console... yep still complaining about it).

Wouldn't it make far more sense to run the games on your beefy PC and connect to that directly with your tablet/whatever? A one time fee (or is there anything good for free?) for remote desktop software, specialized for gaming? At least Sony has the right idea with PS3 -> Vita streaming.

So the new selling point is they want me to pay $15 a month to play games I already own.I don't get it...

It seems like all of the cloud/streaming stuff these days is just a way to get you to pay a recurring monthly fee, potentially forever. Even Sony and Microsoft are heavy into the monthly fees (PS+, etc) this generation.

At what point do you look at your $100+ monthly bill for all these services and determine that you would have been better off just buying a few more AAA games?

Hell for $15 a month you could get a whole bunch of Humble Bundle games, or a few from GoG.

(Or like 1 SNES game on the Virtual Console... yep still complaining about it).

Wouldn't it make far more sense to run the games on your beefy PC and connect to that directly with your tablet/whatever? A one time fee (or is there anything good for free?) for remote desktop software, specialized for gaming? At least Sony has the right idea with PS3 -> Vita streaming.

Hey that's not fair to Nintendo! You could get 1.875 SNES games for $15 unless one of them is Earthbound.

I don't get paying $15 a month to play MMOs really either and this makes even less sense since I already bought the game. Steam is coming out with their own streaming solution which let's you do it for free in the home at least and Nvidia has a similar thing with Shield etc. And as you mentioned Sony allows this free with Vita and PS4 and an incredibly select number of PS3 games + PS1 titles.

So the only use of this service is for people who want to play games they already own on a low powered device outside the home. I just can't imagine the market is very big for this. I doubt it works well with 4G due to latency, so it's probably useless on the bus or whatever.

I'm on a mac, and Excel 2011 is an abomination. Numbers and Libreoffice don't cut it. I do heavy duty financial models and Only Excel 2010 or 2013 64 bit (for Windows) will do.

Parallels and co don't really work on my macbook air. What I need is a $9.99 per month streaming Microsoft Office on a beefy machine.

Is there any company that offers Streaming Office (Office 365 doesn't count) ? Or remote desktop to Windows with Office ?

If this is a regular need for you (say, for work), the very last option might be worth setting up yourself. I don't know how technically literate you are, but reading this site you're probably above average. Setting up a Windows PC, turning on remote desktop, and setting your router to forward the traffic are all within your reach.

It will probably cost you more than $10 a month in electricity to keep a beefy machine on 24/7, though. Otherwise I'd just set it up myself and lease it to you.

So the new selling point is they want me to pay $15 a month to play games I already own.I don't get it...

It seems like all of the cloud/streaming stuff these days is just a way to get you to pay a recurring monthly fee, potentially forever. Even Sony and Microsoft are heavy into the monthly fees (PS+, etc) this generation.

At least those have utility for online and associated costs. What's insane and really "grinds my gears" though is Adobe CC and Office 365, which don't offer anything remotely useful or above the previous versions, and you end up paying like 5x as much money in the long run, assuming it's an application you actually use. (I'm still on CS3, and I see it would have cost me about $3500 in subscription fees to use Illustrator and Photoshop for the same period of time on CC; no thanks, I'll see what hackers have been up to once CS stops working on new computers.)

As far as OnLive though, paying $15/month to use "better hardware" is really a LOT of money unless you really care about being cutting edge all the time, in which case I still imagine buying a new video card every 2 years is (a) cheaper and (b) better performance. I buy a mid-high end desktop every ~4 years, and it's good for gaming the entire time (at least mediocre-acceptable at the end). That's $720 in subscription fees alone for the same period, and I don't even get to sell my old hardware at the end like I can do with an iMac.

Really reaching for the point of this still. Playing Windows games on a Mac for $15/mo is also kind of weird when you can just install Bootcamp and ask a buddy of yours at a university to bag you a free copy of Windows 7, although I guess then you have to boot which is kind of a hassle.

I think the only way this makes sense financially is if it means you don't have to buy a PS4/Xbone to play those 2 or 3 console-exclusives you really want.

It's an awesome idea though. I hope some day it gets implemented well. I thought online music marketplaces were garbage when they came out too (128 kbps, copy protected aac files? no thanks!) but that got a lot better eventually.

The OnLive Go seems to be a footnote, but I have heard that new service uses a pay-per-hour model, not a monthly subscription. If true, OnLive seems to have virtualized the Internet Cafe of the 90s. Time travel on your tablet!

I'm usually optimistic about new services that try to expand the reach of gaming or media, I even like the Ouya, but I just don't see where this fits in.... Yikes.

Yeah, I'm the same way. I was an enthusiastic early adopter of the original, pre-tits-up Onlive (at least when they had their holiday sales), bought a bunch of PlayPass games and gave their micro console to a few friends Unfortunately this new deal seems weak to me, especially since they don't have any software to back it up. That was the case the first time around -- except now my faith in their longevity is shaken and they have a mandatory subscription fee. They also have several better-funded competitors in Sony and Nvidia (both of which give away many of the titles Onlive was previously trying to sell). They also seem to have no plan for iOS.

Hardware and storage costs have gone down, while bandwidth is the same price, more expensive, or capped for many people. Maybe they're hoping to be purchased by Valve or something.

I could see the appeal of hosting MMORPGs, though. Maybe this is how SWTOR finally comes to the Mac.

The OnLive Go seems to be a footnote, but I have heard that new service uses a pay-per-hour model, not a monthly subscription. If true, OnLive seems to have virtualized the Internet Cafe of the 90s. Time travel on your tablet!

Speaking of which, the weird ramble of an "announcement" on their blog tries to rationalize this in a most peculiar way. It's truly bizarre, and more than a little desperate.

"This variable-rate billing model seems very 1990’s, but is inescapable since so many MMO users spend large fractions of their lives connected, sometimes only in the background. Think of it this way, at 5 cents/minute it is 37% cheaper than a Skype call to Italy from the USA, and it’s a connection that consumes >100X Skype’s bandwidth and includes a very powerful computer that would only have been cheaper to have owned after you used it for almost 1000 hours, and even then, it could not achieve our speeds since our data centers benefit from gigabit connections to the internet."

I'm on a mac, and Excel 2011 is an abomination. Numbers and Libreoffice don't cut it. I do heavy duty financial models and Only Excel 2010 or 2013 64 bit (for Windows) will do.

Parallels and co don't really work on my macbook air. What I need is a $9.99 per month streaming Microsoft Office on a beefy machine.

Is there any company that offers Streaming Office (Office 365 doesn't count) ? Or remote desktop to Windows with Office ?

If this is a regular need for you (say, for work), the very last option might be worth setting up yourself. I don't know how technically literate you are, but reading this site you're probably above average. Setting up a Windows PC, turning on remote desktop, and setting your router to forward the traffic are all within your reach.

It will probably cost you more than $10 a month in electricity to keep a beefy machine on 24/7, though. Otherwise I'd just set it up myself and lease it to you.

I'm thinking that a decent machine with i5 and at least 8gb of ram, with windows pro and excel 2013 will cost close to $1,000. Then I have to consider electricity and maintenance. For under $20 per month that means I get 4 years worth for the same price; no brainer.

I'm starting to look at amazon aws to have an on demand machine running windows that I can Remote Desktop into. The thing is that I can't really be bothered with all the setup and maintenance for a windows machine. I want to click and pay.

The OnLive Go seems to be a footnote, but I have heard that new service uses a pay-per-hour model, not a monthly subscription. If true, OnLive seems to have virtualized the Internet Cafe of the 90s. Time travel on your tablet!

Speaking of which, the weird ramble of an "announcement" on their blog tries to rationalize this in a most peculiar way. It's truly bizarre, and more than a little desperate.

"This variable-rate billing model seems very 1990’s, but is inescapable since so many MMO users spend large fractions of their lives connected, sometimes only in the background. Think of it this way, at 5 cents/minute it is 37% cheaper than a Skype call to Italy from the USA, and it’s a connection that consumes >100X Skype’s bandwidth and includes a very powerful computer that would only have been cheaper to have owned after you used it for almost 1000 hours, and even then, it could not achieve our speeds since our data centers benefit from gigabit connections to the internet."

That math is pretty bizarre. At five hours a day, 1000 hours is less than 7 months. If five hours a day seems excessive, consider that they already say "so many MMO users spend large fractions of their lives connected".

Even at only a couple hours a day, you are looking at owning the hardware being cheaper after less than 2 years.

And since when does your connection bandwidth matter for playing MMOs? Ping (lag) is far more important.